People stop us in the street all the time and ask: "How can you say a book is unreadable? Some may be better than others, you may not like some of them, but it doesn't make any sense to label a book 'unreadable.'" To those captious minds, we say: My Little Red Book. Not Mao's unreadable tractate from the 1960's, but My.  

What's it about? According to the publisher's blurb, it's a collection of essays by 92 women remembering their first menstrual period. Ninety-two. Look up unreadable in the dictionary, you'll see this book.

Other than it served as the ticket of admission to Yale for the woman who, um, hatched this project, what can be said about the topic? Lacking firsthand knowledge, we'll surmise that the event in question, like any other life event that happens unexpectedly, happens when you least expect it. OK, we got it.

But the truest test of an unreadable book is that the reviews, even the sympathetic ones, are themselves unreadable. We got about two-thirds of the way through Abbie Zuger '76's review in the Times, when we had to throw the paper down and go back to watching the Really Plastered Housewives of Orange County.

Abbie (that's Dr. Zuger to you) was paid to read this book, but, as an infectious disease specialist in Manhattan, she's seen all the ills to which the flesh is heir. As for us, you couldn't pay us enough.  

It might have comforted the 6,000,000 Jews who perished in the Holocaust to know that their suffering has generated decades of profits for authors, publishers, actors, and movie studios. Of course, those men, women, and children, unlike Kate Winslet, didn't live to thank to Academy.

But for the purest cynical hypocrisy in the field of Holocaust profiteering, you'd have to give the Oscar to the French. The latest example from the folks who brought you Drancy and the Vel d'Hiver: The Kindly Ones.

Supposedly this is a memoir of an ardent Nazi who, like the heroes in Herman Wouk stories, was magically present at the all the events the author wants to describe. Littell wants to describe the slaughter of Jews. Over 900 pages' worth.

To add that frisson of sexual perversion so important when cashing in on atrocity, the protagonist apparently gets his rocks off during these events through various perversions too disgusting to list here (but not if you're charging $29.99).

Of course, the frogs (who compared this swill to War and Peace) will claim that this is all an ironic existential commentary on the human condition and go back to dining with their Gauloise-puffing dogs. But we recognize this volume for what it is: Holocaust porn tied up in a blood-drenched ribbon of faux intellectualizing. 

Aficionados of the unreadable may be aware that ex-celebrity ex-heiress Tori Spelling has already authored, or at least signed her name on the backs of royalty checks for, a memoir. The results must have been sufficiently financially and spiritually rewarding to inspire her to bring the illiterate [Surely, literary? – Ed.] public up to date on her life: to wit, she has reproduced.

We'll bet that she's going to tell us how difficult it is to combine a dwindling career with conspicuous child care, although the proximity of two million desperate illegal aliens ready to be exploited as nannies, bottle washers, nursery muckers, and the like undoubtedly takes some of the sting out of it.

Remember when you and your friends were in their baby producing years? Remember how you had to listen to their tedious stories of labor, delivery, sleepless nights, crying, colic, child care, leaking breasts – [We get the point – Ed.]. You put up with it because you cared about your interlocutor and possibly because you had already inflicted the same stories on them.

Now no one cares about Tori Spelling, and she's not interested in you. So why would anyone read this book?